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Your Game Ideas

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Do we have to take actual hardware limitations and latency into account?

Because if not, I would LOVE to play a MMO based on CCC City by Vinnie Veritas. (see the Rush2++ movie)

It'd have an awesome graphic style, a lot of customisation, and the "competitive" or "fighting" part of it would be real time and skill oriented, jumping and running around, various fighting styles, exactly like in the flash movies. The problem with the bolded section is that it'd require a lot of bandwidth and for everyone to have very fat pipes.

If you want the game to make money, you could always go Korean-style game and charge micropayments for clothings and items. The way I see it, items would be only for the aesthetics of your character, and your skills at controlling your character and fighting would make you win, not stats given by more expensive items.

If you check the comments people left on his site, it seems I'm not the only one who'd love to see his world turned into a game.

You can bet I'd make myself a gambler-type guy who throws some of those explosive playing cards

I've always had a really cool idea for a god game where basically you're introduced to a pre-existing family of your basic mom, dad, brother, sister, pet, and you're given the ability to manipulate them however you see fit. Then you sit back and see how the super-awesome AI responds to your meddling. Like maybe you slide the entrance to a room over, and everyone constantly comes close to bumping into the wall until they get used to it. You could make a person shrink a few inches and they would feel uneasy for the rest of the day and constantly be frustrated at things being just barely out of their reach, or you could shrink them three feet and have them completely flip out.

I'd imagine that AI isn't anywhere near what it would need to be for this to work, but it'd be neat all the same.

I've always had a really cool idea for a god game where basically you're introduced to a pre-existing family of your basic mom, dad, brother, sister, pet, and you're given the ability to manipulate them however you see fit. Then you sit back and see how the super-awesome AI responds to your meddling. Like maybe you slide the entrance to a room over, and everyone constantly comes close to bumping into the wall until they get used to it. You could make a person shrink a few inches and they would feel uneasy for the rest of the day and constantly be frustrated at things being just barely out of their reach, or you could shrink them three feet and have them completely flip out.

I'd imagine that AI isn't anywhere near what it would need to be for this to work, but it'd be neat all the same.

Could you give them guns and increase there violence level just to see which family member would win in a fight?

Start with a space-flight game like Freespace, Tachyon, Privateer, you know. You fly around space, shoot stuff, blow stuff up, and get money from doing missions so you can buy new ships and upgrades and stuff.

Then add planets and space stations you can go to. And leave your ship. And it becomes a first-person shooter. So you can buy yourself body armor and small arms and there's jobs and missions and stuff you can do on foot.

Unfortunately I have no interest in programming or... pretty much anything that could be used for game creation, so I could never put anything forward to make this a reality.

Interestingly enough, there's this Russian PC game that is supposedly exactly that. Forgot the name, though, and bugger if I know where you can get a hold of it.

I know what you're talking about, but it's not really the same. I don't believe you freely explore space or anything. I believe that portion is more like a mini-game compared to the ground elements.

But you stole my idea, you sonnuvabitch! I love the space sim genre, but there have always been a few things that bugged me about them. Space never feels like space, for instance. Generally, these games have space colorful like a bowl of fruit loops. The whole skybox is green or purple or red or what have you. And it's just split up into small zones, although Freelancer did this better as you were given a solar system to explore. Planets generally are simply part of the skybox, too, or interaction with them is not seamless and/or they're small in comparison to the ship. Size is quite often an issue.

I'd want something like you brought up. You can explore space, take on missions from factions, carry cargo, employ as a mercenary, and so on and so on. But space feels like space, and the ships would be designed more realistically. Planets have some real size to them, and you can go from space to the surface of any planet (even gas giants, although you wouldn't want to go too far or your ship would be crushed) seamlessly without any load times. It's not an impossible feature; see: Evochron Renegades. Maybe instead of several jump nodes in a sector, you'd have a solar system like Freelancer but ships can be equipped with a drive to bring up a map, select nearby solar systems to jump to, and jump. No gates to travel to, but perhaps a charge or cooldown time for it so it's not a cheap escape.

And like your idea, you can get out of your ship. You can land on the surface, get out, and start exploring on foot. Scan the surface, find ancient ruins, and walk around them for treasure or clues to other treasure (maybe there would be treasure quests). Not only could you walk around the surface of planets, but you could walk around all the pilotable ships, too. Get out of the driver seat and walk down into your cargo hold; or if you have a big cruiser, one that perhaps couldn't land on the surface of a planet at a city port, go to the bay and take out a cargo ship. That could lead to other gameplay elements, too, such as boarding enemy ships.

When I was younger I had this idea for a game, a space based RTS. It would have been fully 3D featuring fleets of ships fighting epic battles. Then Homeworld came out and I abandoned myself to a life of bitterness and apathy.

You're a new-made angel, and the End of the World is nigh. God's wrapping up his creation and everyone has to take sides. Will you choose to reign in Hell or serve in Heaven? Either way, you'll be battling an assortment of demons, gods, elementals, dragons, mythological figures, Biblical characters, Lovecraftian monstrosities, monkeys pirates ninjas and of course Giant Robots (TM) in the greatest action RPG since Genesis. Choose Good and save babies from demon possession. Choose Evil and possess babies, then make them kill. Or choose Neutral. Side with Man in the Greatest Battle. Lead a fighter squadron against the Heavenly Host. And the Final Boss might be the Finalest Boss of alll... by which I mean God.

I've always had a really cool idea for a god game where basically you're introduced to a pre-existing family of your basic mom, dad, brother, sister, pet, and you're given the ability to manipulate them however you see fit. Then you sit back and see how the super-awesome AI responds to your meddling. Like maybe you slide the entrance to a room over, and everyone constantly comes close to bumping into the wall until they get used to it. You could make a person shrink a few inches and they would feel uneasy for the rest of the day and constantly be frustrated at things being just barely out of their reach, or you could shrink them three feet and have them completely flip out.

I'd imagine that AI isn't anywhere near what it would need to be for this to work, but it'd be neat all the same.

Could you give them guns and increase there violence level just to see which family member would win in a fight?

You really need to meet a friend of mine. Picture extra Syndicate being mixed in with what you've got there and you'd get a title he's dedicated to making one day. 'Cept he had some sort of global database going where people could search for recruits/allies (i.e., other players) for missions and tasks based off their in-game aptitudes. Still, the way you phrase all that, I can see why he's so in love with the whole corporate-war concept

Just to kinda throw this out there... I may try to work on a sort of prequel to this as a mod for Fallout 3. Set about 5 years after the war, before the corporations have a big hold, where people are just trying to get their communities safe and running, with the ending leading towards the potential MMO that won't ever happen

I don't know if something like this was mentioned, but one game I'd like to see is something that combines a space sim like Freespace and an empire sim like Star Wars: Rebellion.

You start out as a rookie pilot for your chosen faction and join a squadron. Do good in your missions, and you get promoted. Soon, you're commanding a squadron, following the mission orders and commanding your pilots. Next, you'll be commanding multiple squadrons based on certain objectives given to you by fleet command. Maybe next you're a ship captain, then a fleet commander. The final position would be head general where you command the entire armed forces.

Maybe add multiple factions and Civilization-like diplomacy, resource, and technology systems. You research technologies, harvest resources (by controlling planets) to build new ships and weapons, then use your might to enforce peace or conquer the galaxy, at the highest level of rank. You could also have different gametypes where you start out at the top, or a ship captain, or what have you. Or you could choose to stay a pilot, turning down that promotion knowing you better serve in the cockpit.

I don't know if something like this was mentioned, but one game I'd like to see is something that combines a space sim like Freespace and an empire sim like Star Wars: Rebellion.

You start out as a rookie pilot for your chosen faction and join a squadron. Do good in your missions, and you get promoted. Soon, you're commanding a squadron, following the mission orders and commanding your pilots. Next, you'll be commanding multiple squadrons based on certain objectives given to you by fleet command. Maybe next you're a ship captain, then a fleet commander. The final position would be head general where you command the entire armed forces.

This is fairly close to how Starshatter plays. As you get promoted you can go from flying in a wing, to leading it, to flying a frigate, all the way up to commanding a carrier ordering everything around. The depth of the game stops there though. I don't think theres much chance of it getting significantly more complex unless it gets bought up, as its taken the small indie team years to get this far.

A concept I always thought would be neat would be one where your main ability is that you can alter the size of your character at will. Just like a free-roaming type game and you can walk around any part of the gameworld from a perspective of 5 inches, 5 feet, or five miles tall. I guess it would work kind of like Katamari Damacy? But you'd have like mission objectives and combat and stuff, and it'd be up to the player to determine what size would be best to tackle a mission with. Being super tiny gives you access to all sorts of secret passageways and lets you avoid deteciton, but if you're caught the enemy's basically going to be able to kill you in one hit. You could also try bursting in at 9 feet high, pounding the shit out of everyone, but you'd be throwing subtlety out the window and attract just about every enemy in the area, and they might collectively be able to whittle you down. You could possibly just stomp on your problem as a giant, but that method might be too indiscriminately destructive in some instances, and it may draw unnecessary attention that will cause for tanks and shit to be brought in.

Beyond that mechanic I don't really know anything else about how the game would work but regardless of the story or whatever I think it'd be a lot of fun.

I'd love to see a game that was a really realistic, historically accurate knight simulator.

You start as a squire or whatever, and work your way up, eventually becoming a knight. You've got your estate to manage, courtly duties etc. in addition to combat. Got to get your own squire eventually, etc. etc. Combat should be realistic and utterly brutal, and fighting should range from one or one to full blown war.

A strategy game where you are in command of the government's forces during a zombie outbreak. You what cities are quarantined or evacuated, where the Army goes, air assets, everything. Haven't thought about it much more than that.

My game idea would be, as it always has been, a 2D, sprite based beat-'em-up with a real, honest-to-God fighting game system combining KOF style move specials and supers with GG style movement. There would also be MMZ style jumping puzzles, and the game would be hard as fuck.

Combat should be realistic and utterly brutal, and fighting should range from one or one to full blown war.

This is why you won't get your game. It's a good idea, and a great niche/budget/indie game. But if people won't buy it without DX9 graphics and engines supporting thousands, then nobody will make it.
To get decent innovative games, you have to forget about amazing 3Dness.

Star Wars Universe+Morrowind/Oblivion/X3 freedom+well done FPS while on planets/stations+X-wing Aliiance while in space+various purchasable and upgradable ships up to and including non military grade capital ships. Don't put in Darth Vader and Luske Skywalker and Yoda just because it's Star Wars. Let me do missions for the Rebellion or Empire sure, but just let me be a random tramp freighter pilot out to make my way in the galaxy who can work his way up.

A serial killer sim. You create a character, define their psychological background, then (depending on how you do the aforementioned activity), you're dropped in a major city, released from a mental hospital, break out of prison, etc. You're then free to roam the city, killing in whatever style and manner you see fit. But you must evade capture by the police, clean up or remove evidence after your crimes, dispose of or abandon bodies, frame others for your murders, and keep up a day-to-day life amidst your killings so as not to arouse suspicion.

Also, Grand Theft Devil May Cry. I've always wanted a game where I'm Dante, I'm in South L.A. (or a similar city), and I'm going around the city, hunting demons at my own free will, taking on assignments for the Devil May Cry agency with little to no over-arching story that would peg it into the rigid linearity of previous DMC games.

Zephonate on May 2008

[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"For a few seconds Oskar saw through Eli's eyes. And what he saw was...himself. Only much better, more handsome, stronger than what he thought of himself. Seen with love."
--John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (Page 446).

I'd love to see a game that was a really realistic, historically accurate knight simulator.

You start as a squire or whatever, and work your way up, eventually becoming a knight. You've got your estate to manage, courtly duties etc. in addition to combat. Got to get your own squire eventually, etc. etc. Combat should be realistic and utterly brutal, and fighting should range from one or one to full blown war.

Basically, sim knight with awesome combat.

Take a look at Mount and Blade - not exactly what you want, but pretty damned close.

I would enjoy it if every new superhero game was built around the same structure as Persona 3.

Basically, every day you would go to work/class/whatever, choose who to interact with, and then at night you would decide whether to go on patrol or not. Different people would provide you with different contacts/technology/whatever. If you're an Iron Man type, certain researchers or whatever would improve certain types of weapons/armor while other people would provide funding or favors. If you're Spider-Man odds are whatever villain you're fighting was mentoring someone close to you so I mean they have to have some useful leads.

The turn-based combat of Persona obviously wouldn't really work correctly for pule-poundingness, but the idea of a social life that actually exists outside of cutscenes is just perfect for people who are supposed to have dual identities. Plus, how in the hell can you make an Iron Man game and not have lady-pleasing as an integral part?

I want to see an RPG with the same bizarre franchise mashup as the Super Robot Wars games, but instead of giant robot anime it's instead mashing up 80's action TV shows. So you would have a situation where Macguyver, Magnum PI and TJ Hooker are driving around in KITT while receiving orders from Jason "Fatman" McCabe. Battles would be a 50/50 split between shootouts and car chases that end with the badguys spectacularly crashing after hitting a curiously placed ramp and flipping the car in slow motion.

I want this game, I want to ponder "Hmm, will I take B. A. Baracus or Rico on this mission?"

Combat should be realistic and utterly brutal, and fighting should range from one or one to full blown war.

This is why you won't get your game. It's a good idea, and a great niche/budget/indie game. But if people won't buy it without DX9 graphics and engines supporting thousands, then nobody will make it.
To get decent innovative games, you have to forget about amazing 3Dness.

Operation Flashpoint didn't have the best graphics but it had great gameplay. It's proof that games can sell without amazing graphics.

I always thought it would be cool if someone made a game with an updated version of the GeoMod engine from the original Red Faction, and a hit model similar to the one used in the Soldier of Fortune series. A game where truly everything was destructible. It would require a hell of a CPU, no doubt, but I think it would be a damn fun game. GeoMod is something I can't remember ever seeing outside of Red Faction, which is a shame. It was a fucking awesome engine.

Also, I want a huge-scale, real-time MMORPG that feels more like a game than a job. I'm hoping Huxley pulls it off well. Ideally, I'd love a Lord of the Rings MMORPG that controlled like the hack-n-slash LOTR games put out by EA during the peak of the LOTR phenomenon. I still want all the stats and gear and management and holyfuckhuge world that LOTR:O had, but I want something that's actually fun to play. Meaning I don't want the same boring-ass "press a hotkey, watch the spell go off, repeat" formula.

I want a first-person Eternal Darkness game on the Wii. The Wii-mote and nunchucks would be your 'hands', and the character you play would influence everything. You would only see your character's face in the Tome and in cutscenes, and combat could be avoided at all costs or changed depending on your character. Sanity meter would be much less easy to refill and be less gimmicky with more gameplay-changing effects - keep the things like the statues and paintings changing, or the fake game effects, lose the exploding head when you enter a room.

For instance, for one chapter, lets say you're playing an older man who's maybe weak and old, or someone undergoing chemo. You'd be slower, and not very strong. So a lot of your puzzles would be setting traps or evading in creative ways - climbing ladders, and then throwing them down, or picking up a bag of marbles your child owns and tossing it at the Bonethief filled servant lumbering towards you. Your chapter could be set in the mansion, so you'd have the advantage of knowing the lay of the land.

Imagine the Anthony chapter where you're slowly being zombified and you have little tooltips showing up with like "You pick up the vase but your hands are weak and clumsy." Imagine instead if you 'reached' with your hands and noticed a mottled rash going up your wrists, and when you picked it up the controls suddenly stopped working.

A larger, stronger character could pull weapons out more easily - tear a decorative piece of wood off a staircase and throw it, use larger weapons, and so on and so forth, but they could also do more harm to themselves when sanity gets low.

Also, more than one character per chapter, and if your sanity gets low your character begins committing self-harm or begin to refuse to move or react in situations, so you have to switch.

Imagine the Anthony chapter where you're slowly being zombified and you have little tooltips showing up with like "You pick up the vase but your hands are weak and clumsy." Imagine instead if you 'reached' with your hands and noticed a mottled rash going up your wrists, and when you picked it up the controls suddenly stopped working.

Oh shit. That does actually sound awesome.

Willeth on May 2008

@vgreminders - Don't miss out on timed events in gaming!@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!

Imagine the Anthony chapter where you're slowly being zombified and you have little tooltips showing up with like "You pick up the vase but your hands are weak and clumsy." Imagine instead if you 'reached' with your hands and noticed a mottled rash going up your wrists, and when you picked it up the controls suddenly stopped working.

Oh shit. That does actually sound awesome.

Sign me up. That sounds like a really excellent way of making motion controls central to gameplay, both in terms of what you do to progress and in how information can be presented to you.

Imagine the Anthony chapter where you're slowly being zombified and you have little tooltips showing up with like "You pick up the vase but your hands are weak and clumsy." Imagine instead if you 'reached' with your hands and noticed a mottled rash going up your wrists, and when you picked it up the controls suddenly stopped working.

Oh shit. That does actually sound awesome.

Sign me up. That sounds like a really excellent way of making motion controls central to gameplay, both in terms of what you do to progress and in how information can be presented to you.

You could have the triggers mean 'grip' for each independent hand, even. So if you had to rip a rotten bit of wood out of something, you grip the rotten bit with your left hand, and the rest with your right, and rip.

Willeth on May 2008

@vgreminders - Don't miss out on timed events in gaming!@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!

The story would start off with the main character either doing something around the house and getting news of his young sister's death or with him at the funeral for her, wondering why God would give his innocent sister such a cruel fate.

Troubled by her death, he decides he needs to spend some time on the road, traveling, or something of that sort when he hears rumors of ancient ruins called Heaven's Gates, and that there is some way to use these ruins to open the gates that seal off the world to the heavens.

Now that the typical JRPG "holy crap i'm the emo antagonist and now i'm on an adventure" is out of the way, uh.. I really didn't put much thought into the middle of the story, other than during his travels around the world, he learns that the world is truly a depressing place where people are plagued with loads of problems, ranging from poverty to disease to stillbirths being commonplace, et cetera.

Eventually the man finds out that the rumors of the gates are true when he triggers the last gate and the gates to heaven open in the sky above the world.

When the man arrives in heaven, either via something more commonly used in RPGs like an airship, or something that I think would be a lot more awesome; a ladder created by the world to get to heaven

Either way, upon arriving in heaven, something seems amiss as the denizens there are all scrambling to the gates to escape back down to the world, the hero decides to continue pushing simply to ask god why he would do such things to the world.

Eventually making his way to the top of heaven, he finds a very withered old man (with a huge beard, of course), resting in a large chair. The man tells him that he's truly happy that someone could finally open heaven's gates for him, because he wishes to see his children a bit longer before passing on.

He tells the hero that there's one thing he would like him to see while he's here, and shows him an orb atop a golden pedestal, claiming that it is the birth of a new world where everybody is happy.

You go take a look, but all you can see through it is what looks like hell. He tells you it's beautiful, and you realize that it is nothing more than something that makes people see what they wish to see, and for you, that's the truth.

So.. heaven's gate is actually hell's gate and god is satan, or something like that. The end fight would probably be something like satan kicking your shit in and destroying the world piece by piece to make room for his new one that he claims exists; with the world being destroyed, every person of the world comes to heaven/hell and finds the hero in his near-defeated state, facing satan. All the people who had troubles in their lives no longer have them. People who were poor now look nice and fancy, people missing limbs now have them, and most of all, his sister is there.

Everybody helps him to fight back, a new world is created, and as the only living being left, he becomes god or something like that, and his own world is recreated in heaven where everybody is happy.